Interview with Havoc Pennington of Red Hat (OSNews) [LWN.net]

OSNews interviews Havoc Pennington, the head manager of Red Hat's Desktop department. "In the past (pre-SCO), Red Hat has admitted that was growing wary of patent issues that might arise in the future. Do you believe that desktop open source software written by many different individuals around the globe might be infringing on patents in some cases without the knowledge of these developers? At the end of the day, we have seen some patents that were issued so shortsightedly that many have said that writing software is almost impossible nowadays. What kind of solution for this issue might OSS software developers find, to ensure a future that is not striken by lawsuits left and right?
Havoc Pennington: As you know we've been more aggressive than other Linux vendors about removing potentially patented software from our distribution, specifically we took a lot of criticism for removing mp3 support."

Interview with Havoc Pennington of Red Hat (OSNews)

Posted Sep 16, 2003 1:40 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (3 responses)

I feel honored to have been (mis-)quoted by the great Havoc Pennington. At the end of the interview, he (mis-)used my couplet from the Gcc libstdc++ FAQ: "When will it be done? Sooner, if you help.".

Interview with Havoc Pennington of Red Hat (OSNews)

Posted Sep 17, 2003 1:45 UTC (Wed) by hp (guest, #5220) [Link] (2 responses)

Sorry, I'm pretty sure I ripped you off _via_ RMS though. ;-)
I didn't know it was yours originally.

Seems to be a popular confusion:
http://www.netsys.com/suse-linux-e/2002/03/msg02351.html
http://www.linuxcare.com/viewpoints/os-interviews/latest.epl
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/os-merrier.html

Interview with Havoc Pennington of Red Hat (OSNews)

Posted Sep 17, 2003 3:16 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

It might not be mine, in fact. I could have channelled RMS, unconsciously. Or, it might be the Matthew Effect at work. I wouldn't mind so much if it's the latter, I just want to keep the quote grammatically correct. :-)

If in fact it's really the former, my apologies to RMS. If the latter, I'm flattered that RMS quoted me too, and correctly.

Interview with Havoc Pennington of Red Hat (OSNews)

Posted Sep 17, 2003 4:13 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

A Google Groups search seems to award the honors to Jim Winstead, then at Harvey Mudd College. His comment was in reference to the release of Linux 1.0, in 1992: see.

RMS might have used it in 1998, in private. In any case the notorious net.kook Erik Naggum posted it in reference to the Emacs 20.4 release, toward the end of that year. My use was in April of the following year, and people were quoting RMS saying it a few months later.